by David Hicks
“This gooth aright!” our esteemed professor exclaimed. “Unbokeled is the male!” And we all let out a cheer.
Reynard took us to his favorite pub, called the Burp Castle, which was just down the road from Flynn’s apartment on East 7th. It’s a shabby little place with murals of monks on the wall, and the bartender “shushes” everyone when the conversation level gets too loud, so we’ve referred to it as the Shush Bar ever since. Flynn felt right at home there; being shushed was his natural condition, he said. Reynard didn’t stay very long, he had a pint of stout and then had to get home to his wife, and the rest of our classmates left soon after that, but Flynn and I stayed for hours, talking nonstop. We discovered we had a lot in common. We had both lost our fathers when we were in high school; we were both raised by religious mothers, but now rejected our religions completely; and we both considered working at a bookstore to be our dream job, however quaint an occupation “the noisy set . . . the martyrs call the world” would consider it.
At one point, he put his hand on my shoulder in a gesture I can only describe as fraternal. “Pete Silverman,” he said. “I’ve been looking for a friend like you my whole fucking life.” Then he bent his head, belched quietly, and stumbled to the bathroom.
I was working at St. Mark’s at the time, and by the end of the week I had convinced the owner to hire Flynn part-time. Flynn took to the job right away: great with customers, totally in love with books . . . it really was his dream job. He said he’d much rather work there and at Dojo, where he waited tables on weekends, than be a college professor.
At the end of his first week I asked him if he wanted to come to a party my friend Jack was having at his apartment on Astor, he said sure . . . and we all wound up getting drunk on Jack’s Bombay gin. Flynn is one of those guys who can be pretty shy, but at a party, he comes out of his shell. He says hello as if he’s absolutely delighted to meet you, looks as if it just made his day that you shook his hand, and acts as if he can’t wait to hear all about your most intimate secrets, skip the small talk. We drank so much that night and had such a good time that we wound up putting on bathrobes we found in Jack’s bedroom closet. We discovered a golf bag in there too, so we improvised a game of putt-putt in their tiny living room. At first we set down empty wine glasses and were trying to putt the ball into them, but then one of the glasses broke, so we used coffee mugs instead. Then we set up obstacles, and before you know it Flynn had taken out the nine-iron and executed a perfect chip off the carpet. The ball sailed right through the open window and as it fell five stories we all cringed, thinking we’d hear the sound of a windshield smashing or someone screaming out in pain . . . but instead we heard the sharp tap, tap, tap of the ball bouncing across Broadway. Everyone roared their approval and high-fived Flynn, and he fell to the floor laughing and apologizing at the same time. That’s when Jack’s wife came home, saw Flynn on the floor in her bathrobe, and kicked us all out, so we piled into cabs and went to Puglia’s in Little Italy. I don’t remember much about that part of the night except that Flynn flirted with the waitress and told her he was part Italian, which was an outright lie, and when she told him to come back when he was a full Italian we all toasted her for her wit and Flynn for his audacity. After that he led us to the Café Palermo (boldly declaring it was better than Ferrara’s), slapped down a twenty and said “Cannolis for everyone!” and my god they were the best damned cannoli I ever had. I remember both of us mocking each other because we got some of the cannoli cream in our beards, and on our way out Flynn hugged us all and said he was so happy to have made such good friends, at that moment he was happier than he had ever been in his life, and as if to punctuate his little speech he walked up to a girl on the sidewalk and kissed her on the cheek, and she shoved him away but laughed as she did so, and then her friend said “Wait, I’ll take some of that action” and gave Flynn a big smooch on the lips and mussed up his hair, and this is the kind of thing that used to happen in the city late at night but no one ever talks about it.
Our friendship grew. We met for breakfast at the West Fourth Diner (or Lil’s, as we called it, after our favorite waitress), worked together at the bookstore, took our lunch breaks together (at Dojo, the Kiev, Eddie’s, the BBQ, or Pane e Cioccolato), and often had a few beers together at night. We never, not once, ran out of things to say to each other. We were brothers. I don’t use that word lightly. We went to Knicks and Rangers games, saw a bunch of concerts at the Bottom Line, and our favorite thing was to go to readings at the 92nd Street Y. We saw Alice Walker there, Mark Doty, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sam Shepard, Richard Ford, and a cool tribute to Herman Melville by a bunch of novelists on the 150th anniversary of Moby-Dick. Good stuff.
Then, 9/11. Then, Rachel. Flynn changed from this fun-loving guy to the poster child for Codependency. It was all so surprising to me. I’m still a little blown away by it, and hurt too, I suppose. I went from seeing him every day to hardly ever—and if I did, he was usually with Rachel, and she and I inevitably got into some friendly bantering that turned into an argument. I couldn’t tell if she was flirting with me (Flynn later said she had a little crush on me) or establishing her dominance, but it was as if arguing was the way she communicated with people. She had strong opinions about everything. If she ever did one of those personality tests, she would be 100% “J.”
So when he told me they were engaged, I wanted to say “Gah! Don’t do it!” but instead I reminded him of what he had told me the previous year. I had been in a relationship with a woman, Debra was her name, an ardent feminist, and I had committed the heinous crime of attending Jack’s bachelor party (she called us “a bunch of Neanderthals” but all we did was go to a Mets game and out to a bar afterwards) . . . and the relationship had turned sour after that. Flynn had gently pointed out to me that I seemed to be trying to make up for all the men who had done Debra wrong in the past and was staying in the relationship out of a perverse sense of obligation. He understood my behavior, he said, because he had always felt guilty over what he “had done to” Rachel in college. Apparently they had gone out on a date, and to Flynn it was just a friendly date, but to Rachel it was like the prince had come into her house with the glass slipper and it fit . . . followed by nothing: no phone call, no second date, just friendly hellos whenever he saw her on campus. Years later, when they met up again at some softball game, she gave him shit about it and he spent the entire evening trying to make it up to her, and then promised to “make every effort to cultivate a real relationship” afterwards, despite their geographical distance. I shouldn’t make the same mistake he had made, he said. But now here he was, still trying to make it up to her, this time by proposing. So I reminded him—“Remember when you told me never to stay in a relationship out of obligation?”—and asked him if that was the case, if that was why he was marrying Rachel. But he just said, “No, it’s not like that anymore, I really do love her now.”
After that . . . there was nothing to say. I sat there as he explained why he was going ahead with it, and I guess in retrospect I regret my silence, I regret not calling him out on his lie, I regret not telling him straight out that he was making a big mistake. They got married a few months later, they moved to White Plains . . . and I didn’t see him anymore.
Then, they had a baby of course, and when Nathan was a few months old, Flynn came down into the city with the little guy and we met at the Alice in Wonderland statue. Flynn was pushing one of those collapsible baby carriages, and his hair was cut short, and he had shaved his beard, so it all felt very different. But we had a decent day. We went to the Frick, but Nathan started crying (no doubt at the offensively trite Fragonards), so we left the museum and walked around the neighborhood to settle him down, had lunch at a diner on Lexington. We did that kind of thing a few more times (“Sundays with Uncle Peter,” Flynn called them), including one visit a few days after my mother died, when Flynn embraced me as soon as he saw me, and when I tried to pull away he kept me close, saying ho
w sorry he was for me, until I felt the unspoken permission to let down my guard—you know how that goes, when you’re with someone who knows you better than you know yourself—and I found myself sobbing into his coat. “I’m an orphan now,” I kept saying. I knew I was being melodramatic, but it really got to me, losing my mom. He doesn’t have too great a relationship with his own mother, but he kept his hand on my shoulder as we walked and he told me about his father’s death, and how he remembered little things about him all the time . . . like the whistle, the one his father used when he wanted to let Flynn know he was in the stands during baseball games, and then Flynn did the whistle, two short chirps, right there at the park, and then he started to cry too. See, this is why I love the guy.
On another visit, we met in Harlem, had lunch at Amy Ruth’s, then walked the length of the park toward midtown. He told me things were good . . . but to me, he seemed suspiciously upbeat. You know when people say things are great but they nod their head a lot, as if they’re trying to talk themselves into it? He had bags under his eyes and he had an even-more-terrible haircut. Still, he was . . . buoyant. This is who he was. I suppose it can be frustrating at times, because you never know what you’re getting when you see him. Are you getting the real Flynn or Flynn the talk-show host? He’s like one of those guys who commits suicide and afterwards all his neighbors say, “But he always seemed so cheerful!”
When it comes right down to it, I’ve decided, almost every relationship involves two people with intense insecurities masked by whatever behavior it takes to keep those insecurities from being exposed, while at the same time revealing their equally desperate need to have them exposed, even embraced. It’s a recipe for disaster. And yet it gets repeated every day, all over the world.
We went on like this, seeing each other only once in a while, with the occasional phone call, until one day, he called me out of the blue and said he needed a “Big Pete Silverman Talk,” so he came down without Nathan and we met at McSorley’s, in our old neighborhood. He looked terrible. Very thin. His eyes were red.
“I think I have to leave her,” he said.
“Ah,” I said, nodding. Good for him, I thought. And yes, I’ll admit, I also thought Finally! I’ll get my best buddy back. “Then leave,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not that easy,” he said.
I took a sip of my beer. “If you need a place to stay . . .” I said. But we both knew I had a studio with a twin bed. “I have a friend who has an air mattress.”
All around us was bustle and noise. McSorley’s is the opposite of the Shush Bar. Everyone’s shouting to be heard over everyone else, and the waiters carry eight mugs at a time, shouldering their way through the crowd, not worrying if there’s a little spillage along the way. The sawdust on the floor catches everything.
“Simple,” Flynn said, “but not easy.”
His eyes were watery and fearful, and he kept looking around, as if now that he had declared his marital misery he would be executed by firing squad.
I don’t know much about what happened after that day. I only know I didn’t get my friend back. In fact, it was even harder to get a hold of him from that point on. Once when I called he picked up the phone but I couldn’t hear him; all I heard were the sobs of a dying man. After he hung up, I called back, but he never answered. Whatever it was, I never spoke to him or saw him again.
It’s been over two years.
*
The best time of my life, the very best time I’ve ever had in my life, was with Flynn. We were at the Cedar Tavern, watching the Super Bowl: St. Louis versus Tennessee. He was rooting for the Rams (me, I didn’t care much who won, but I cheered for the Rams for his sake), and it was a great game. Afterwards, we stayed in our booth for hours . . . and we wound up closing the place. We were friends already, but that night, that’s the night that solidified it. That’s the night I told him what happened. How my father died. He was in a bath house, on 28th Street, you know the kind, when it caught fire, and he died of smoke inhalation. I didn’t know this at the time. At the time, I was told he had died of an aneurysm, a word I didn’t understand. That’s what my mother told everyone . . . everyone who called, everyone at the wake, everyone at the funeral. Then, when one of my father’s friends asked why it was a closed coffin, she burst into tears. My uncle was the one who told me the truth, after my mother died. I had no idea my father had this double life. He was a sweet man, very nice to my mother. But think about it: that must have been very hard for her.
Now, I live near that building. I walk past it every day.
Flynn listened to the whole story and he didn’t say anything bad about my father; he just shook his head, said “What an awful way to die,” patted me on the arm and said something about how hard it must have been to have to deal with his sudden death, and all the lies and cover-ups, when I was only sixteen. That was the same age he was when his own father died. He told me he had found out at a baseball game, just after he had made a terrible play in the outfield, and because of that he always associated his father’s death with a feeling of failure and humiliation, not loss or grief.
“That’s me too,” I said.
By the time we left it was late, maybe one in the morning, and it was cold outside, and we were pretty drunk. We were walking with our arms around each other like buddies, half-holding each other up, when we heard a car drive by blasting the opening harmonica notes of “Thunder Road.” We started singing the song together, we knew every word, and we kept singing it, louder and louder, as we walked down University, and at the end of the song we went under the arch, and while he pretended to wail the sax solo I pointed at him, shouted out “The Big Man!” and then we both ran through the park, jumping on benches the homeless guys weren’t sleeping on, and we started drunk-parkouring with our heavy coats on, leaping up on railings, knocking over garbage cans, swinging from tree branches, sprinting down and up the little amphitheater, our breath clouding the cold air. Flynn fell hard on his shoulder when he tried to side-jump one of the statues, so after that we left the park and jogged down 8th Street, past the NYU classroom building, then turned down Mercer and jogged past where he used to have his cubicle when he was a grad assistant, then past the Bottom Line, past Lil’s diner, across West 4th toward the Tisch building, then back up towards Tower Records, and on Broadway Flynn jumped up on the hood of a cab while it was at a red light and the driver opened the door and starting flipping out on us but we were too drunk to care.
Now, Tower Records is closed. The Cedar Tavern is closed. 269 Mercer isn’t even a valid address. The Kiev, closed. Lil’s diner became the Violet Café, and now it might as well be closed because it’s a fucking Starbuck’s. The Polish place, Christine’s, where we used to get cheap dinners, that’s closed. Eddie’s closed a loooong time ago. The BBQ relocated. The Bottom Line, fucking closed. All the places we loved: closed.
I love this city. There’s no place like it. But nobody’s here anymore.
HIGHER LAWS
Professor Flynn Hawkins came home from work, tossed the mail onto the kitchen counter, poured dog food into Mollie the Collie’s bowl, opened the package of chicken breasts he had set out that morning to defrost, and set the oven to 375 degrees. He began to wash the chicken under hot water, but then felt a wave of dizziness, so he dropped the breasts into the sink, grabbed hold of the rim, and lowered his head.
Chicken was one of the few foods his wife Rachel liked, but only if it was baked, so they ate it that way once a week, with Ore-Ida frozen potatoes and canned corn or raw carrots, along with “salad,” which for Rachel meant iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing. Of late her tastes were even more restricted, as she was five months pregnant. When she had come home from her gynecologist’s office and broken the news, Flynn’s first thought was, How? They hadn’t had sex in what seemed like a year. But then he remembered: Thanksgiving night. Flynn had cooked the turkey, moist and delicious, but Rachel’s mo
ther had refused to eat it, saying it was undercooked, wondering aloud if they were all going to die of salmonella, then manufacturing a coughing fit the moment Flynn’s mother lit a cigarette. But then Nathan and his cousin Marianna sang a song for everyone, Mitch, who was a cop in the Bronx, told some funny stories about the idiotic crooks he had recently arrested, Annie brought out her famous rhubarb-and-cherry pie, and after everyone left or went to bed, he and Rachel pulled out the couch, Rachel said, “Thank God that’s over” and they had sex, quick and muffled so her parents, sleeping in their bedroom, wouldn’t hear.
His second thought: I’m done for.
When the wave passed, he put the chicken into a Pyrex pan, sprinkled on some rosemary, tossed in a quarter-stick of margarine, and slid the pan into the oven. When he straightened, he saw his reflection in the back window, dark and gaunt, as if a criminal were standing outside his house, looking in at him.
He sorted the mail on the kitchen table, leaving the American Express statement unopened so Rachel wouldn’t accuse him of spying on her. It was usually between four and nine hundred dollars, with a long list of purchases—mostly clothes for Nathan, she’d say, but there would be other charges: Liz Claiborne, Ann Taylor, Filene’s. He took out the stack of bills from the antique desk, added the new ones, and reordered them according to urgency: mortgage first, then gas and electric, car loans, credit cards, school loans, insurance, AT&T, and payments for the sailboat Rachel had bought without his knowledge and kept on a lake near Binghamton, where her parents lived. Flynn would write some checks for the first of the month and delay others so they’d have enough for groceries, gas, and birthday presents for Nathan, who would turn four in a couple of weeks. Five years earlier, when Rachel had moved into Flynn’s apartment in the East Village, he had worked three jobs (clerking at the St. Mark’s bookstore, teaching part-time at Cooper Union, and waiting tables at Dojo) while researching and writing his dissertation (on Hawthorne’s ambiguity as a response to self-assertion in 19th Century canonical works), and Rachel taught Pilates at three different places while getting her master’s degree in Physical Therapy. Now, they made more than twice as much as they did back then, but it seemed twice as difficult to balance the books. And soon there’d be more hospital bills. Another mouth to feed.